Since 2007, TI adopted a strategy that involves releasing calcs before everything is even ready at all.

So it's up to us - let's resume TI's work and release patches/fixes for the current TI-84+C OS bugs like we allready did for the TI-83+/84!

Well, I've finally tracked down all the undocumented system addresses BrandonW used in his DUSB ROM dumper, and it seems to be working now.   The DBUS dumper is also working (much faster than tidump, naturally, though not as fast as DUSB.)

However, in both cases, remotely launching the program is causing problems.  At least part of the problem, I think, is that the homescreen is just *so slow.*  In the case of the DUSB dumper, remote launching seems to work in Classic mode but not in Mathprint mode.  For the DBUS dumper, it fails in both modes.  I'll have to play around more to figure this out.

The signaling rate of the Silverlink, if I remember correctly, is limited by TI to about 2 Kbyte/s, so half-an-hour for a complete dump is about right. You could make it considerably faster by adding logic that detects and avoids unused pages, or just hard-coding the sectors of the ROM unlikely to be important. A blacklink might get considerably higher throughput under some circumstances, but since you can't (by design) maintain complete CPU control in the protected and fully-preemptive environment that all modern OSes provide, the link may be less stable at high speeds.

Lionel: In fact, the 89/CA commands would, I think, have the same problem that the DUSB remote control command has: namely, that after you send the command, the calc then types out "Asm(prgmROMDUMP)", one token at a time, on the homescreen, which (owing to MathPrint combined with the slow LCD driver) means it takes a second or two for the program to actually be launched.  I increased the delay in calc_84p.c to 3 seconds and it seems to work now.

The issue with the DBUS dumper was a different one.  In that case, I was using the internal link routines (linksw.asm) rather than the system ones - the internal routines don't work when the link assist is enabled.  (The OS automatically disables the link assist when it's idle, which is why the program worked when I launched it manually.)  Still, nice to know that the software method still works.

DrDnar: What you describe (skipping unused areas) is essentially what we do with the TILP ROM dumping protocol.  It would also be possible, in theory, to add an option in TILP to dump only the OS and skip the archive/apps completely.  I think, though, that the standard behavior of dumping a complete Flash snapshot is a useful one (and it avoids any possible problems with future OSes, from TI or third parties, that occupy a different subset of Flash.)

DJ: The issue was really just with the remote program launching; once it's launched, the ROM dumper itself is plenty fast enough.  When I tried it before it took about 3 minutes to dump over USB and about 4 minutes with the SilverLink.  (My archive is still mostly empty, though; a calc with a lot of programs installed will take significantly longer.  I also haven't timed the latest version.)